Review/Art; Paintings That Liberate the Viewer's Imagination

By JOHN RUSSELL

Published: April 12, 1991

In the paintings of Joan Mitchell at the Robert Miller Gallery, the metamorphic potential of abstract painting is everywhere present.

There are paintings in the show called "Trees." Nothing is described, but we come away nonetheless with a new idea of the tree -- the tree as signaler, for instance, standing deep and tall in the shade with daylight ablaze behind it. There are also trees that almost double as human beings. Have they been changed, the way Daphne was changed by Apollo into a laurel tree? Impossible to say, but in these paintings the imagination has a license to wander.

There are also paintings called "Sunflowers." There is nothing here of the droopy, old-gold look that van Gogh brought to the subject. In Miss Mitchell's works, blossoms are tossed high into the air, as if by the force of their will to live. They may also come bunched and knotted and go careening through space. In at least one, they form up like acrobats, each eager to outdo the other.

To anyone who knows that Joan Mitchell has lived for quite some years now in a house 40 miles from Paris, and has below her garden gate a landscape made famous by Monet, it might seem that her home ground has already been saturated by a painter of genius. It might even seem possible that her sunflowers would echo van Gogh, who died not so far away.

But these paintings are not portraits of places. Nor are they variations on the work of great predecessors. It is not in her nature to monitor the landscape around her, minute by minute, as Monet did. Nor is hers the kind of prayerful nature that van Gogh brought to his every undertaking.

Her work can be read from time to time as a duet for painter and landscape. But fundamentally these pictures are self-portraits by someone who has staked everything on autonomous marks that are peculiar to herself. Those whirling emblematic shapes and those signature combinations of orange and lavender (to take one instance only) are hers alone. Code names for an exceptionally intelligent and combative nature, they are like dancers who can do double and triple turns in the air and think nothing of it.

The paintings are very large (up to 110 by 157 inches) and they come in diptych form. As their size is exactly adjusted to the bone-white and windowless walls of the gallery, and as the palette is exactly attuned to the level of the light, visitors are drawn in, enveloped and held captive.

Her present apotheosis gives one hope for the serpentine ways of the art world. Ever since 1953, when she began to show at the Stable Gallery in New York, Miss Mitchell has been someone to watch for. But since 1958, when she was included by two doughty judges of the new -- Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg -- in a museum survey of "Action Painting," she has been ranked as an absentee, not to say a defector, who preferred France to the United States and did not fit into the accepted career patterns. For that reason there are histories of American postwar abstract painting, and museum surveys of that same subject, in which she plays no part. To that general neglect, the retrospective organized in 1988 by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., was a happy exception.

The absurdity of her general situation was pointed up when it turned out that one of the key events of the late 1980's was Miss Mitchell's show of new work at the Robert Miller Gallery. The now routinely derided 1980's could not have had a more upbeat finale than that long series of paintings. They were exuberant, but never vacuous. Many of them were painted in circumstances of great physical difficulty, but there was never a touch of weakness, let alone of self-pity.

The brush moved with a glorious freedom, the color was consistently ecstatic and there was a readiness to mess with ideas that sprouted up all over like mushrooms after rain.

The present show is tighter and more concentrated. But as in 1989, Miss Mitchell does not come on as an ailing veteran, or a survivor, or as someone who has been unfairly neglected. She comes on as her own sole self, with the ability to bring her world to life as never before.

The paintings of Joan Mitchell remain at the Robert Miller Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, through April 20. Luigi Lucioni Louis Lozowick Richard York Gallery 21 East 65th Street Through April 20

It was during the Depression that the Italian-born Luigi Lucioni (1900-1988) came to age as a painter. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought his "Dahlias and Apples" in 1932.) At a time when many a gifted painter had no public at all and would shortly turn in desperation to the W.P.A. for a minimum wage, Lucioni had admirers who would buy his paintings by the batch and come back for more.

Looking at his paintings in this show, we can see why. Lucioni was a serious, concentrated workman. Digging deep into the common denominators of visual experience, he never fell below his own best level of well-made pictorial carpentry.

Where all around him was falling apart, his pictures stood for stability and reassurance. Alternative identities for the objects in his still lifes did not present themselves. Faced with them, no one felt uneasy or inadequate. It would not be surprising if he came into favor again.